Innehållsförteckning för November 2024 från Total Guitar

Have you ever wondered why funk guitar parts seem to have that infectious groove with seemingly simple riffs? Well, sometimes it’s not what you play, it’s how you play it – and palm-muting is a crucial component of tight funk playing. Funk aficionado Jude Smith is here to show us all exactly how it’s done. He’ll guide you through correct hand placement, demonstrate how to incorporate palm-muting into chords, licks, and doublestops, and provide practical exercises to help you master this skill. This is part of the Learn Funk In 7 Days course from Pickup Music – you can follow along with the video for free if you want to see exactly how to play each exercise. Your attack, tone, and dynamics depend on hand placement – so don’t breeze…

Kenny Wayne Shepherd penned a chunk of his new album Dirt On My Diamonds Vol.2 while soaking up the history of Alabama’s FAME Studios, a place where legends such as Etta James and The Rolling Stones cut records in the past. Here, the Lousiana-born bluesman discusses his creative process from writing to recording, and explains how the gear addiction he developed as a young player is still as powerful as it ever was… Your new album Dirt On My Diamonds Vol.2 is the second instalment of a two-volume epic. What was your thinking behind this? It really boiled down to me trying to do something different and wanting new ways to engage with my fans. You don’t see many two-volume albums anymore. When I first started recording these songs, I was…

COVER FEATURE Just six months into TG’s life we were hit by what thought would be a revolution: The Roland VG-8 and GK-2A guitar modelling system. The GK-2A ‘hex pickup’ converted each string’s signal into a separate digital signal, avoiding tracking problems that had plagued earlier attempts at digital guitar modelling, while the V-Guitar System promised to be able to model anything at all. “Imagine,” wrote music editor Joe Bennett, breathlessly, “play a Strat at one end and out comes the sound of a Les Paul, acoustic guitar, or even a tinny banjo…” “Don’t be deceived by appearances – the VG-8 is not a multi-FX unit. Rather than just processing the guitar’s output, it takes the vibrating string as a starting point and creates the sound from scratch, so you…

COVER FEATURE In the 30 years since TG was first published, we have mourned the passing of so many legendary players. Within the last decade, we’ve lost Eddie Van Halen, Prince, and the man that Brian May and many others called The Guv’nor, Jeff Beck. And back in 2004, we lost one of the most influential and beloved figures in the world of heavy metal – Pantera guitarist ‘Dimebag’ Darrell Abbott. His death was as shocking as it was senseless. On December 8, 2004, in Columbus, Ohio, Abbott was performing on stage with Damageplan, the band he formed with his brother, drummer Vinnie Paul, after the breakup of Pantera. During the first song of the set, a deranged fan jumped on to the stage and shot the guitarist multiple times.…

COVER FEATURE One surreal aspect of being TG is that sometimes our biggest guitar heroes turn out to be fans of us. Kirk Hammett and Joe Perry have both told us they read the magazine, as have Yungblud and Fontaines D.C.’s Conor Curley in more recent times. But nothing tops the time Mark Tremonti wrote Ahavo Rabo Taco Salad exclusively for TG and got the rest of Alter Bridge to play on it. It also marked a changing of the times. After the guitar solo wasteland of nu metal, Mark Tremonti spearheaded the return of shred. Did you want to really exploit your shredding capabilities that don’t get used as much in Alter Bridge? Totally, because when I’m backstage, I’m practising the real shred stuff, whereas in Alter Bridge I…

COVER FEATURE If our Too Drunk To Pluck feature hasn’t informed you of just how daft a gang of feral TG staffers can be, well, check this one out. For an all-too-brief handful of issues around 2005/2006, freelancer and TG shred guru Charlie Griffiths was requested by mag editors to indulge the silliest of all their loosely guitar-related ideas. The result was our video feature titled Challenge Charlie. High points included asking Charlie to snap all the strings on his guitar in under 30 seconds (his innovative approach involved a rope and a car – you can work out the rest), playing Van Halen’s Jump while jumping (this time with a trampoline being our hero’s tool of choice) and delivering a version of Roundabout by Yes (yup, you guessed it,…

Back in February 2021, we ran a poll to find out your views on the greatest guitar solo of all time. Then, here at TG Laboratories, we donned our white coats and set about analysing the top 20 lead breaks under our musicological microscope. Our goal was to look at the science behind the solos to find out if there’s some secret formula, a foolproof blueprint to replicate the success of these giants of rock. At the end, we created a scientifically proven greatest solo of our own based on our findings (which you can download at the link above). Here are a few of our results. HOW IT WORKS • Instrumentals are out! So no Eruption or Cliffs Of Dover in our experiments• Our focus is on ‘classic’ solos,…

Buying a new tuner might not be the most exciting way to spend your cash, but it’s an essential piece of kit for any guitar or bass player. From polyphonic to chromatic tuners and beyond, one type reigns supreme in terms of accuracy – the strobe tuner. The Peterson StroboStomp Mini is a fine example of this and, while it might not be as thrilling as a new overdrive or modulation pedal, it’s about as exciting as a tuner gets. First up, it’s incredibly accurate (correct within 0.1 cent). Its quick-reacting strobe display encourages you to make the smallest of adjustments on your tuners to really lock the tuning in. It works well on guitar and bass, so players who are regularly drop-tuning can rely on it, too. If you…

FIRST LOOK PEOPLE ✪ NEWS ✪ NOISE In possibly the most surprising trend of 2024, we’ve seen the return of the doubleneck from multiple brands, with Harley Benton the latest to concede that two heads are perhaps better than one. The DC-Custom II 612 (£499) is set to create a bustle in your hedgerow, thanks to the pairing of six- and 12-string guitars into one instrument. The meranti body delivers a double-cut design with two meranti necks. Both of these are 24.75-inch scale-length, with roasted jatoba fingerboards and 22 medium-jumbo frets. Electronically, it’s equipped with a quadruple humbucker count from Roswell: two Tesla TM VR-60 Classic Alnico-5 models for the six-string side, and a pair of Tesla Opus-G1 Alnico-5 Vintage for the 12-string. The control set is simplified with a…

Lead single from the forthcoming album From Zero, The Emptiness Machine features this anthemic twin-guitar riff which has a powerchord part played by Mike Shinoda and a melodic octave part from Brad Delson. The powerchords serve to outline a chord progression in the key of D minor. In drop D tuning, play the three lowest open strings, then barre at the 5th, 8th, 3rd then 10th frets. For the accompanying guitar part, use your first and third fingers (or first and fourth if it’s more comfortable) to play the octave shapes on the third and fifth strings. Depending on the angle of your fretting hand, you should be able to mute out the idle strings by stubbing your fretting fingers against them. Get the muting just right and you should…

PIXIES Nirvana. Radiohead. Weezer. All have the Pixies’ weird-out/freak-out signature stamped across their foreheads. Formed in Boston, Massachusetts in 1986, Pixies changed the alt-rock game forever with the classic albums Surfer Rosa (1988), Doolittle (1990) and Bossanova (1990) with era-defining songs such as Where Is My Mind?, Here Comes Your Man and Debaser. The mad scientist behind the bulk of that indie rock splendour is guitarist and lead vocalist Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, aka Frank Black, aka Black Francis. A lyrical savant and a master of loud/quiet dynamics, Francis set the template for ’90s rock, which has been copied endlessly across the years. But he couldn’t have done it without his trusted sidekick Joey Santiago, who injected gain-drenched, off-the-wall, shards-of-glass-meets-sticky-pop guitar goodness into the mix. As Joey tells TG,…

We have Steve Howe to thank for extending progressive rock’s boundaries beyond the horizon. The Yes guitarist’s jazz sensibility and musical curiosity shaped a sound that continues to evolve. His conceptual new solo album Guitarscape comprises a diverse array of chordal-driven guitar instrumentals, recorded with his son Dylan on drums. What guitar did you learn on? I think it cost £14. I bought it in King’s Cross, London. It was just a brownish archtop kind of guitar, two f-holes and a bridge. Nothing fancy. It wasn’t a Framus but it was like that kind of guitar, and that was the first instrument that I owned. I was very grateful my Dad bought it for me. That was in 1959, and I really started in 1960. How much did you practise…

In the first year of a new millennium, Oasis guitarist, songwriter, occasional lead vocalist and perennial motormouth Noel Gallagher invited TG to Wheeler End Studios just outside of London, where he had recently completed work on his band’s fourth album Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants. With characteristic bluntness, Noel told us straight off the bat: “The new album is very good but not great. I think we can do better and probably will.” He also conceded that it had been a challenge form him to handle pretty much all of the guitar tracks on the album following the departure of founder member Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs. “I never really wanted to play lead,” Noel said. “I’m more of a rhythm guitar player. That’s how I write.” Bonehead’s replacement was already…

In December 2003, Muse guitarist Matt Bellamy spoke with TG writer Joe Matera to give us the lowdown on the band’s third album Absolution, which we described as “some of the grandest, most unashamedly epic guitar music ever created”. When quizzed on how he managed to achieve such an impressive wall of noise, Matt was more than happy to spill the beans. After trying out “a lot of different cabs and heads” he ended up sticking with “a Diezel head with a Soldano cab”. As this pairing worked so well on the recordings, he revealed it was going to be his tone for an impending world tour, pointing out how the MIDI-controllable Diezel VH4 head allowed him to plug straight in and have all his effects, like the Line 6…

The year was 1995, and for TG’s ninth issue, having been launched less than a year prior, a 38 year-old Edward Van Halen invited writer Steven Rosen into the pinball room at 5150 Studios for an in-depth look through his evolution as a guitar player, his favourite gear and Van Halen’s latest full-length Balance. And despite being the biggest guitar hero in the world, Eddie was remarkably modest, talking about creativity and inspiration with the same humbling fear as the rest of us. “You’d figure after 11 records and all the sh*t I’d done that I would know what I was doing,” he laughed. “But I still don’t f*ckin’ know. I get just as nervous, just as insecure as I always did.” This album signalled a creative and personal rebirth,…

PEOPLE ✪ NEWS ✪ NOISE As the guitarist in Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the house band for Stax Records, Steve Cropper was a key figure in shaping the sound of soul music in the ’60s, backing legendary singers including Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. Steve co-wrote the classic songs Green Onions and (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay, and also recorded with rock icons John Lennon and Rod Stewart. His latest album, Friendlytown, features guest spots from Billy Gibbons and Brian May. How did Billy Gibbons come to be on the new album? Billy and I have been friends for 30 years, but we’ve never actually worked together before. He ran into Jon Tiven, my co-producer, in a grocery store and he asked, ‘What’s Steve doing these days?’…

There’s something special about acoustic guitars. The resonance of the wood right up against your ribs is a unique experience. In this lesson, we’ll go over six easy strumming patterns so you’ll be ready for any acoustic situation. Visit guitartricks.com/acousticmag for more in-depth and step-by-step acoustic guitar lessons, too. When learning how to play guitar, the first strumming pattern you need to understand is the simple eighth-note downstroke/upstroke pattern. It’s as straightforward as it sounds: a simple down-up-down-up strumming pattern in an eighth-note rhythm. To make this more interesting, we’ll be doing this with both ‘straight’ and ‘swing’ feel (more on that across the page) in examples 1 and 2. Next up is a folk/country strumming rhythm, which alternates between the bass strings and the higher strings. Because folk music…

OPETH Mikael Åkerfeldt has been called many things over the years. At best, the Opeth leader has been hailed as a visionary. But when his band’s tenth studio album Heritage was released in 2011, a vocal minority of fans lambasted the singer/guitarist for abandoning his metal roots in search of more progressive and folk-flavoured musical meditations. Some even went as far as sending death threats, enraged by how their favourite musician had the forsaken underground extremities that launched his career in favour of more avant-garde and psychedelic influences which – let’s face it – had always been detectable in his wildly creative pursuits. For the most part, however, the Swedish quintet were deeply admired for daring to march to the beat of their own drum, resulting in the breathtaking sounds…

COVER FEATURE Total Guitar debuted in December 1994 with – who else? – Jimi Hendrix on the cover. His influence on Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers made Jimi especially relevant as TG launched in 1994, but Hendrix has never been anything less than a natural cover star. Our Bluffer’s Guide promised to teach you to “Play your guitar upside-down and fell mountains with the edge of your hand”. BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO HENDRIX This feature contextualised Hendrix’s playing and early career: “After Hendrix was invalided out of the US Air Force because of a parachuting injury, he supported himself by playing with any band that would take him on. The Isley Bros, B.B. King, Ike & Tina Turner and Sam Cooke all benefited from having the young Mr Hendrix…

In February 2023, TG’s cover story on Brian May was billed as ‘The Ultimate Interview’, and that was no exaggeration. Editor Chris Bird has had many conversations with the Queen legend in recent years, but this interview, spread over 20 pages, was truly definitive. Marking the 50th anniversary of the band’s debut album, Brian told the story of Queen’s extraordinary career while focusing on the songs that he created, beginning with Keep Yourself Alive, the opening track on that first album, and running through other landmark songs such as Stone Cold Crazy (a precursor to thrash metal), The Prophet’s Song (an epic to rival Bohemian Rhapsody), We Will Rock You, the mother of all rock anthems, Brighton Rock, one of Brian’s statement pieces, and The Show Must Go On, the…

In recent years, TG has focused on responsible pursuits like improving your knowledge of guitar playing. This, though, was the early noughties: the height of Top Gear, Jackass, Loaded and lad culture. Into this rich cultural milieu came TG’s immortal drinking experiment. The premise was simple: a contest to see who could still play the opening two bars of Sweet Child O’ Mine after the most drinks. Slash being mysteriously unavailable for this important research, TG’s editor Stephen Lawson, staff writer Nick Cracknell, music editor James Uings, and deputy editor Phil Ascott stepped up, with production editor Claire Davies dodging the vomit and keeping score. Our excuse that we aimed to discover whether, as some had apparently claimed, you can play better when drunk. But mostly it was a chance…

In an exclusive, in-depth interview with TG editor Chris Bird in 2020, Led Zeppelin legend jimmy Page discussed his evolution as a player, the fine details of his unique style, tone and composition, and the creative process that went into the holy trinity of Zeppelin songs – Whole Lotta Love, Kashmir and Stairway To Heaven. “With Whole Lotta Love, that was clearly going to be the track that everybody was going to go to,” Jimmy said. “If somebody plays that riff it brings a smile to people’s faces.” He also recalled his gear choices for that song and its parent album Led Zeppelin II. “I was using the Super Beatle amps with the [Rickenbacker] Transonic cabinets. So that’s exactly what’s on Whole Lotta Love. The first album’s got the Supro;…